Gloxinella lindeniana: Amazing Gesneriad

I don't have a crazy story behind this one, just found the leaves to be incredible.  It screams "delicate".

Gloxinella lindeniana

While physically substantial enough to be nearly self supporting structurally, the leaves are *really* light, and nearly translucent.  To illustrate how wildly different plant leaves can be, here it is next to a Ludisia discolor orchid:

After it gets tall enough, it starts putting out flowers, or what I first thought were flowers:

It should be noticeable by now just how over-leveraged the roots seem to be.  That tiny little pot can't be more than 2 inches.  I've kept this thing out of direct sunlight and considering what is known about such delicates, I'm assuming it's actually a rather low-light plant.  It's been flourishing in a west window that doesn't actually get sun .... inside.

Those flower things are kinda mesmerizing.

I kinda left it alone for a bit - low light and medium humidity means it's probably slow growing and I'm ok with that.  Oh boy was I surprised:

Huh.  So that really how it flowers.  Gotta wait for the flowers to open.

Here's a different view for the internet crowd watching:

And here finally the bloom opens:

The blooms seem to last a couple of days for me, but I'm not gonna give it any grief.

Time passes and here it looks about 2 months later:

So, it seems to need staking for support - it might actually be etiolated from light level too low even for this forest floor specimen.  In any case, the root system was small enough and non-aggressive enough that all I had to do was transplant the whole soil plug into a general houseplant potting mix.

Minor caveat - for whatever reason, the generic potting soil wasn't sold as "high drainage" the way that cactus soil is.  Put it's a lot lighter and more aerated than what I expected.

I have also never waited more than 3-4 days to rewater Gloxinella.  It is probably not even remotely drought hardy.